Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) (43 page)

George moved into the room Carl had occupied and joined them for Thanksgiving dinner. Tommy and his aunt tried to make the occasion as normal as possible, cooking a large turkey and preparing stuffing and sweet potatoes and corn and cranberry relish. Ruth made four pies, two pumpkin, one pecan, and a strawberry-rhubarb in memory of Carl. They sang the doxology before they ate, and Tommy led them in giving thanks—for the friends they had, for the friends they’d lost, for the new friendships still forming, for all the blessings the Lord had showered upon them, and for his love, which still burned strongly in their hearts.

After dinner they all watched football on the television, and Tommy tried to explain, for Quinn’s benefit, what was happening on the field. Dani sat next to Cassandra on the couch. Ruth adamantly refused to let any of them help her clean up in the kitchen.

George kept himself apart and said little. He was brooding at the thought that his mother’s body was still unburied, but it was not safe to do so yet.

After the football game ended in the early evening, Tommy and Dani called a meeting. They sat at the dining room table, pie plates pushed away from them.

“We need to talk this through,” Dani said. “Tommy and I are committed. We’ve been called. It’s that simple. But the rest of you still have a choice. Even George has a choice. I know you all understand what’s at stake, but we need to get it on the table. If you want to walk away to take care of yourselves or your families, or for any reason, you can do that. You don’t have to explain, and nobody will think any less of you.”

She waited.

“Well, I’ll go first,” Ruth finally said. “I’m in. Period. You’re my only family, Tommy. You and your dad. He’d be in if he could be. Whatever you need.”

“I’m in,” Quinn said. “I’ve got nothing better to do.” He glanced briefly at Tommy.

“Well, don’t look at me,” Cassandra said. “I’m not bailing. Do you really think I’m going to go back to Hollywood and make more idiotic movies about spunky young women who just gotta make it on their own? I mean, seriously? I’ll help any way I can. And I might know other people who can help.”

“George?” Dani said.

“I don’t know what good I’d be,” he said. “But I’m with you.”

Tommy looked each person in the eye to make sure, then poked the table with his finger. “Done,” he said. “Just remember whose side we’re on. It’s not just us.”

Dani jumped in. “That said, we still need to do what we can. We’ve been called to action. Evil triumphs when good people do nothing. So if anybody has any ideas, now would be a good time to share.”

“I was thinking,” Quinn said. “I might just take that job they offered me at Linz Pharmazeutika. See what I can learn from the inside.”

“There’s a good chance they know who you are,” Tommy said. “We don’t know what Carl told them.”

“That’s true,” Quinn said. “But from what you’ve said, I don’t think he would have told them anything more than he had to. And even if they think I’m a spy, they might want to figure out what I know. They might even try to turn me into a double agent, like old Tibald. In which case I’d pretend to agree, and then I’d be a triple agent. How many microbiologists get to do that?”

“I was talking to Dani about Udo Bauer,” Cassandra said. “Dani’s impression was that he fancies himself quite a ladies’ man. I think I could make myself into quite a lady.”

“Cass, that’s too much to ask,” Tommy said.

Cassandra touched him on the arm to stop him. “I’m a good actress,” she said. “It would be nice to do something that’s actually important with the one thing I can do really well. Role of a lifetime.”

When Cassandra had finished, Ruth spoke up. “I’m a research
librarian,” she said. “And a gun collector. I will do research. And shoot people when asked.”

“Okay then,” Dani said. “I think that’s enough for tonight. Let’s get some sleep, and then in the morning we can start making plans.”

Tommy asked Dani if she wanted to go for a walk before bed. They bundled up and Tommy took her by the hand, leading her out beneath a sky filled with stars. They strolled the grounds with Otto keeping them company and finally sat on the Adirondack bench beneath the willow tree overlooking the pond, where Tommy put his arm around her, then his other arm, and kissed her. When the kiss ended, a good while later, he smiled at her, their faces a few inches apart.

“I am so sorry I doubted you,” Dani said. “I will never do that again.”

“I won’t give you any reason to,” Tommy promised. “But if it happens, and we get confused, either of us, we talk to each other, openly and honestly, and figure it out together. We’re much better together than we are apart.”

Dani remembered what Villanegre had said about the two kinds of art history students. She and Tommy had different approaches, but they always arrived at the same conclusions, taking different routes.

She kissed him again, letting her passion flow, and for a moment she could block out everything else and bask in this glow of good feelings she hoped would last forever. She wanted to do everything for this man and everything with this man.

“I don’t know when we’ll get the chance,” he said, “but when I can, I have to do something. Carl told me a long time ago, before any of this happened, that he wanted to be cremated. I promised I’d take his ashes up to Alaska, to a place called Taylor Bay. I’d like you to come with me when I go.”

“I’d like that,” Dani said. “I’d like to do an autopsy on him first. If he had a demon inside him, I’d like to see if there’s any physical evidence left behind. We might be able to learn something.”

“Science can’t answer everything,” Tommy said, “but I’d be interested to know what you find out.”

“I was thinking I’d send that list of names to Ed Stanley,” she said. “He said Guryakin’s name was on a list. Maybe some other names will mean something to him.”

“Good idea,” Tommy said. “Are you going to tell him where you got them?”

“I will if he asks.”

With all the leaves down, the view was spectacular, and they could see the lights of the town in the distance. When she commented on how lovely the view was, Tommy told her he’d been lucky when he bought the property.

“This is the highest elevation in Westchester County,” he said.

“Really?” she said. “Higher than Bull’s Rock?”

“Oh yeah. By maybe fifty feet or so. Which is another way of saying it’s all downhill from here.”

Dani turned and looked at him, eyes alerted. “What did you just say?”

“It’s all downhill from here,” he said. “Joke. Figure of speech. Dani? Earth to Dani—are you okay?”

She was lost in her thoughts, waving her hand at Tommy to give her a second. After a moment, she rose from the bench, excited. She had it— everything became clear.

She’d assumed that Provivilan was part of some kind of plot, but there was no way to distribute enough of it to cause any real harm. It wasn’t a virus or a living microorganism that could reproduce itself, and it wasn’t an infectious agent that could spread through contagion.

“Wait here a second,” she told Tommy, running to the house.

When she returned she was carrying a glass jar, which she filled with water from the pond. She then hurried back into the house, and Tommy followed. She set the jar of pond water on the food island, went to his cupboard, grabbed a coffee filter, and poured the water through it from the first glass jar into a second. The water in the second jar retained a slightly brownish-green hue, but it was clearer than it had been.

Quinn looked on as Dani held the jar up to the light, examining it.

She turned to him. “I want to test something—how long would it take you to get another sample of Provivilan?”

Quinn hesitated. “Less than a minute,” he finally said.

“You have more?” she said.

“I got some from Illena. But I lied. She didn’t steal it so we could test it. I’ve been on it for about six months. Sort of a test group.”

“Why?”

“I have a tumor, Dani. Cass, I was going to tell you too.”

At first Dani thought she’d heard him wrong. It took her a moment to realize he wasn’t joking.

“Provivilan treats cancer?” Cassandra asked.

“No, but it treats the sadness that comes with it,” Quinn said. He pointed to the base of his skull. “My oncologist thinks it’s all in my head. You know me. Once I get something in my head, it’s hard to get it out.”

“Oh, Quinn . . . ,” Dani said. “When—what can they do?”

“Inoperable,” he said. “And right now—and I’m choosing my words carefully, Dani—it’s also inconsequential. Let me get you that sample.”

He went upstairs and returned a moment later with a small plastic orange bottle. He opened it and poured a handful of pills into Dani’s hand. She told him she needed the reagents he’d prepared. Quinn went to Tommy’s study, where he had set up a place to work in the corner, and returned with a pair of bottles, one marked
Provivilan Reagent/Blue
, the other labeled
Doomsday Molecule Reagent/Red
. Dani filled two drinking glasses with clean springwater from a bottle in the refrigerator and brought them to the food island.

“Two glasses,” she said, “both with nothing but clean water in them. Okay? Tommy, I need some drinking straws.”

He brought her a box of straws from the cupboard. She took one, dipped it into the bottle of Provivilan reagent, and placed her thumb over the top of the straw, using it as a pipette. She moved the straw to the first glass of spring water and lifted her thumb to drop the contents into it.

“If this works,” she said, cracking open one of the capsules of the drug, “when I dump Provivilan into the glass containing the assay, it’s going to react, right?”

“The anionic form is blue,” Quinn said.

“It will turn blue if what’s in these capsules is really Provivilan. So . . .”

She dropped the contents of the Provivilan capsule into the first glass of water, and it indeed turned a pale shade of blue. She swished the water around to mix the contents.

“But this isn’t going to hurt anyone,” she said, raising the glass. “This is just Provivilan. It lacks the molecular components needed to turn into the Doomsday Molecule, right?”

“Right,” Quinn said. “It needs to combine with a number of other components.”

“This reagent,” she said, using another straw to draw a sample from the second bottle and dump it into the second glass of clean bottled springwater, “will react to the presence of the Doomsday Molecule. What will happen if this glass has any of the Doomsday Molecule in it—the drug they were testing on Amos Kasden and the others?”

“It should turn red,” Quinn said. “I modified the Bradford assay. But we don’t have any more samples of the Doomsday Molecule.”

She dropped the reagent into the second glass. Nothing happened. She dumped the contents into the sink and rinsed the glass.

“We don’t,” she said. “Doomsday Molecule reagent red plus clean bottled water equals nothing.” She refilled the second glass with bottled water, added a capsule of Provivilan, swished it around, then added the Doomsday reagent. Again, nothing happened. “This did not turn red. This means Provivilan is not the Doomsday Molecule. Now watch.”

She again emptied the second glass and rinsed it. This time she filled it halfway with the filtered pond water she got from Tommy’s backyard pond. She added a capsule of Provivilan to the pond water.

“Now we have something entirely different,” she said. “Bear with
me—when people take antidepressants, their brains don’t utilize 100 percent of the drug. The brain utilizes what it needs, and the rest passes through the kidneys and gets flushed. And these days, there are so many people taking so many different kinds of antidepressants that our wastewater effluents contain a virtual cocktail of psychotropic compounds, like a big SSRI smoothie.”

“I got in trouble when I asked for only bottled water on the set,” Cassandra said. “I got called a diva because I didn’t want to poison myself.”

“I thought sewage treatment plants cleaned up the drinking water,” Tommy said.

“Waste water is indeed recycled,” Dani said. “But treatment plants can’t strain out the catecholamine metaboloids. It stays in the water.”

“In concentrations too small to worry about,” Tommy said.

“Just because we
don’t
worry about it doesn’t mean we
shouldn’t
worry about it,” Dani said. “It’s there, in our drinking water. It’s in the ground and in the clouds and it comes down with the rain. A small portion biodegrades, but the larger portion doesn’t.”

“Okay,” Ruth said.

“And so, in this glass,” Dani said, holding up the glass combining pond water and Provivilan, “that smoothie of psychoactive compounds is present. This is water from the pond out back. To which we added Provivilan.” She swirled the water around again. “So if we add the red Doomsday reagent . . .”

She used a straw to add the Doomsday Molecule reagent into the second glass.

They watched. Cassandra crossed her fingers. Ruth rubbed her nephew’s back. Quinn’s face registered an increasing concern as the liquid took on a pinkish hue, then a deeper magenta, and finally a bright red.

“Lord, help us,” Ruth said.

“That’s how they’re going to do it,” Dani said. “As Quinn said, Provivilan has to combine with something. Provivilan is going to pass every test every
FDA scientist ever performs on it. The new wonder drug is going to go on the market, people are going to take it, it’s going to pass through their systems and enter the effluents and eventually the drinking water supply. And then, in miniscule concentrations, one part per trillion, it’s going to combine with metaboloids already in the environment and turn into the Doomsday Molecule, and then it will impair the cognitive development of boys by polluting the womb environment. A few girls too, but mostly boys. They’re going to grow up lacking Purkinje cells, and they’ll seem like wonderful, happy, intelligent, productive little boys, but then when they hit puberty, they will
all
turn into homicidal, suicidal, raging monsters craving the adrenaline rush that comes from inflicting pain and committing violent acts. They’ll be addicted to it. It’s . . .”